Today's consumer is inundated with advertising. In fact, advertising is so ubiquitous it is often times ignored. What is more, many people lack the belief that companies tell the truth in advertisements. As a result, word of mouth marketing and advertising has become increasingly important with respect to the sales of certain products. Word of mouth refers to the passing of information, especially recommendations, but also general information. In the context of advertising and marketing, the use of word of mouth may mean passing information between consumers or other entities, including manufacturers, experts, retailers, etc. to convey aspects or merits of a product or service, or the experience one person has related to that product or service, or related products or services.
The emergence of the importance of word of mouth marketing and advertising has coincided with the use of the Internet for researching, shopping and purchasing of products. Thus, online marketing and advertising has also become increasingly important. The use of word of mouth marketing in an online setting may therefore be an effective method for such online advertising, as consumer recommendations allow word of mouth advertising to be disseminated either online or offline.
In fact, according to a 2007 global Nielsen survey, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising, as cited by 78% of the study's respondents. When businesses enable customers, or other types of users, to write reviews, ask or answer questions from the community, or share experiences, they create content that become powerful forms of marketing, and in particular, as discussed above, word of mouth marketing.
This view has been widely reinforced by many retailers (retailers will be used herein to refer to any type of seller of a product or service, for example both online and brick and mortar) who report that products with relatively more reviews sell better and are returned less often. Thus, user-generated content (comprising any information such as text, audio, video, or other information carrying medium generated by a user who is a consumer (of goods, a product, website, service, purchaser of the product, etc.)) may be extremely important to manufacturers, retailers or other sellers of a product or service (collectively referred to herein as a product) as user-generated content may allow products to be differentiated and sales of products increased.
As this user-generated content may include such things as user reviews, user stories, ratings, comments, problems, issues, question/answers, or other type of content which, for example, a user is allowed to compose or submit through any medium, there may be many methods and locations (for example, online or offline) where a user may be allowed to generate content and the user content generated may be provided in a wide variety of mediums or formats the distribution of this user-generated content may be difficult. In fact, in many cases user-generated content may be more effectively generated or gathered at one location and more effectively utilized at a different location. Thus, the effective collection and distribution of user-generated content may be important to both manufacturers and retailers of products, as utilization of such user-generated content may increase sales of these products.
Accordingly, improved systems and methods for the collection and distribution of user-generated content are desired.